91–100 of 115 posts
What's stopping them from creating 1000 core cpus?
Yields are the main barrier to single pieces of silicon that big. You have a certain chance of getting a defect per square mm of you chip and as they get bigger the chance of a bad defect gets higher and yields go down. Often they'll occur in a place where you can just disable a core or bank of cache and still sell the chip but not always. So yield rates tend to go down as chips get bigger. Also larger chips make les…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yields are the main barrier to single pieces of silicon that big. You have a certain chance of getting a defect per square mm of you chip and as they get bigger the chance of a bad defect gets higher and yields go down. Often they'll occur in a place where you can just disable a core or bank of cache and still sell the chip but not always. So yield rates tend to go down as chips get bigger. Also larger chips make les…
How do GPU cores differ in that they have thousands of cores?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be awesome if instead of a Rosetta-like (or qemu-user-like) compatibility layer, the chip supported multiple ISAs natively. The only company that has the rights to do both ARMv8 and amd64 is.. AMD :)
That would be nice but NVidia got in legal trouble with x86 patents when they tried to do that with their Project Denver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver
It might be more feasible now, except in the last ~5-10 years there's been a push to make many PC apps x86_64 only (e.g. Ubuntu dropping i386 support), so the benefit isn't quite as wide any more.
The real question for me with all these AMD releases, what's Intel gonna release? It's surprising to me that Apple didn't announce an AMD based Mac Pro-- the chip Intel gave them must really be something. Too bad though because there could be a lot more of them (eventual Mac Pros) out there I'm guessing if they were using these Rome chips.
The real question for me with all these AMD releases, what's Intel gonna release? It's surprising to me that Apple didn't announce an AMD based Mac Pro-- the chip Intel gave them must really be something. Too bad though because there could be a lot more of them (eventual Mac Pros) out there I'm guessing if they were using these Rome chips.
People use Macs also to produce music and for this task the most important is single core performance. AMD is not great at this and it seems like the new line of CPUs could only get on par with Intel which isn't enough to convince professionals to move.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yields are the main barrier to single pieces of silicon that big. You have a certain chance of getting a defect per square mm of you chip and as they get bigger the chance of a bad defect gets higher and yields go down. Often they'll occur in a place where you can just disable a core or bank of cache and still sell the chip but not always. So yield rates tend to go down as chips get bigger. Also larger chips make les…
How do GPU cores differ in that they have thousands of cores?
What's more equivalent to a CPU core would be what NVidia calls an SM and AMD calls a compute unit. These decide which instructions to issue next and broadcast them to the various lanes. You'll have dozens of them in a typical GPU, about the same as the number of CPU cores in the same silicon area.
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The Mac Pro uses the LGA3647 socket, which I assume will give it some headroom for incremental upgrades in the next few years before a major overhaul is due. Intel already offers 112-thread part for that socket.
No, the 56C/112T Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 is a BGA part, it's not socketed. You can buy this niche product only as part of a server with liquid cooling. And the successors to Cascade Lake seem to switch to the LGA4189 socket to support 8 memory channels (Cooper Lake and Ice Lake), so I wouldn't expect any upgrades on LGA3647.
The good news is that the next generation Mac Pro will have a ton of extra memory bandwidth.